Home.

This blog is going to be clunky. I’m over-tired, self-conscious and conflicted over the subject matter. It feels important to say that my intention for this blog is not to “air my dirty laundry”. I work within the emotional landscapes of the body, so why write at all if I can’t share what I’ve personally endured?

It has been 6 months since closing The Hollow Store and as many months underground releasing every tendril of my identity attached to it. I folded up the corners of that 7 year chapter quickly out of self-preservation. Business was not always easy for me and I walked away feeling very wounded. Not by the economic crisis, not by the fear of failure but … by people I cared about.

I consciously went undergound to nurse a betrayal and the gaslighting, ghosting, campaigning and allyship it provokes. Coming home was to lay still, slow my heartrate and wait for the poison to leave my body. I ached for months. I ruminated. And then ruminated more, so much that the jelly of my eyes felt like it might burst out of their sockets. I wanted to control the impacts of what was wildly uncontrollable.

I’m writing about my experience because it’s a recurring theme I sit with in clinic. Betrayal holds so much shame and judgement because we have to be emotionally (or professionally) invested in the perpetrator(s) in order to be ‘betrayed’. It’s our emotional flesh being torn away from our bones, exposing not only a gaping injury but a serious doubting of our judgment too.

Activated B6 and Chakra meditations hold no power here. In fact, very little does when the body is in acute turmoil. It’s just you and your inescapable felt reality. So instead of bypassing or numbing my process I lovingly climbed inside of it. I learned to move my body against the ache. I had to rest enough to unravel. I removed anything that siphoned my energy. Coffee was one of those things - I swear I was one flat white away from cardiac arrest. I longed for Nature, for dirt and tree bark. For solitude, quiet and camp fire. I longed to sit inside a circle of women who howled in every direction around me.

I endured the muddy waters. I also rekindled my deep love for tea. And to be fair, I was recovering from small business too, 7 years of survival.

A magical part of working from home is the endless stream of ceremony that endures for days at a time. This has been very powerful to sink into without disturbance and a major part of my recovery. I created gentle and soft rituals in my life, at home, away from people so my body could trust again.… and it turns out that I’m a bit of a recluse, which is the exact medicine I needed (and will continue to need). Age is funny like that - you learn to conserve the energy it takes to uphold unnecessary warfare.

My experience reinforced to me why A LOT of my work is focused on D E E P nervous system restoration (deeper than just taking a supplement to feel more calm). You see, the nervous system looks for queues of sustainable safety and energy to regulate itself, and most of us haven’t developed the skills to meet those needs when we’re experiencing internal-conflict. And the conflict can be of biochemical origin (dis-ease) and not an external event caused by others.

Our body produces an inflammatory response to any kind of conflict - we call these our “symptoms”. Because ultimately, our vital organs cannot function properly in that environment and why so many illnesses can be traced back to chronic nervous system dysregulation. Elevated stress hormones directly affect the Autonomic Nervous System which is involved in regulating the function of our primary organs - especially the GUT and our capacity to digest. It begs the question: Are we supplementing our nutrient deficiencies or are we just compensating for the kind of life that leeches those nutrients from us?

To truly touch the inside of that vast intelligence is a slow, safely guarded and tender process. One that I can (*almost) say I’m grateful to have experienced - in the real, deep humanness of who I am. And that removing the layers of energy-distortions like coffee, has allowed me to meet myself in ways I could not have otherwise. Quite an interesting revelation.

Deeper still, there is no war here. There is just me. Older and with much less armour.

So yeah, I just wanted to say Hi. I’m here, I’m human and flawed and slowly bringing more of my work forward now that I have time to be with myself.